Hi,
I am trying to identify the number of black men in a specific country for 2017-2020 years. Is this possible for me to do using this IPUMS data and if so, how? I’ve tried to through USA, CPS, and NGHIS but have not gotten very far.
IPUMS provides demographic data for the U.S. and around the world. For countries other than the U.S., I recommend using IPUMS International or IPUMS IHGIS. Unfortunately, neither has many datasets in your focal time frame. It is also worth noting that measurement of race varies greatly between countries.
In case there was a typo in your original post and you meant county instead of country, you should be able to get at this information using IPUMS NHGIS, and possibly IPUMS USA and IPUMS CPS depending on the county of interest (USA and CPS are person-level microdata and do not identify all counties to protect respondent privacy).
I am linking the main IPUMS tutorials page–this page includes brief video tutorials on using our data access systems as well as longer introductory webinars for IPUMS International, IPUMS NHGIS, and IPUMS USA. I am also linking to tutorials on creating an extract with IPUMS USA (the basic approach described here is very similar across all microdata websites), using the IPUMS NHGIS Data Finder (this approach is similar to using IPUMS IHGIS), and using our online analysis tool.
I hope this helps. If you can provide more detail about the specific places you are interested in, we will do our best to provide more targeted information.
Hi! Thank you for the valuable information!
I did make a typo in my original comment, I did mean county!. I am specifically trying to find the number of people in each of these counties in Ohio (Montgomery, Franklin, and Hamilton) who meet the following demographic criteria (Black+men, Black+women, White+men, White+women, etc) for each year from 2017 through 2020.
I tried going through IPUMS USA but the data indicated that there were only a thousand or so Black men in Montgomery country in 2017 which seem awfully low. Based on the tutorial you linked, I clicked the correct variables so I’m not sure why I am seeing this discrepancy. Is it possible that I am seeing this discrepancy because the data is limited for protecting respondent identity?
I’d appreciate any insight on this!
I am not able to replicate your exact numbers, but my first guess is that you are reading the unweighted sample size (i.e., number of observations in the data) rather than the estimated population (i.e., the number of people in the target population they represent). The ACS data are a sample of the US population, meaning they must be weighted to inflate the number of responses in the data to get the correct point estimates. I am linking an FAQ blogpost that provides helpful framing for thinking about sampling weights. Below are my results for a crosstab of race by sex for Montgomery County, OH using the 2017 1-year ACS using the SDA tool; I have highlighted the sample size in yellow and underlined the population estimate in red for Black men. Please email ipums@umn.edu if the unweighted sample size does not seem like the cause of your issue so we can provide more targeted troubleshooting support.
